Keywords & Targeting
Location Exclusions
Location exclusions are geographic areas, from countries down to cities and postal codes, where a campaign is prevented from showing ads even if they fall inside a broader targeted region.
In practice
Targeting a state while excluding three cities you will not serve, or targeting a country while excluding regions you cannot ship to, is how location exclusions are meant to work. They are essential for shipping-restricted products, service businesses with hard boundaries, and any campaign where a large targeted area contains pockets of unprofitable traffic.
Two rules trip people up. First, location options: targeting people in a location versus people interested in it produces very different traffic, and the presence setting is the right default for local services. Second, precedence: a positively targeted city inside an excluded state will still serve, because the more specific positive target wins. Check the geographic report after launch rather than trusting the settings screen.
On Meta, exclusions work similarly at the ad set level, and on Microsoft imported campaigns should be re-verified because location mapping is not always one to one.
Why it matters
They stop spend in places you cannot serve or sell to, but only when the precedence rules are understood.
RELATED TERMS
Bid Modifiers (Bid Adjustments)
Bid modifiers are percentage adjustments applied to bids for specific dimensions such as device, location, ad schedule, audience, or demographic, raising or lowering what you pay in those segments.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are terms added to a campaign, ad group, or shared list that prevent ads from showing on searches containing them.
Budget Pacing
Budget pacing is the practice of planning and controlling how ad spend is distributed across days, weeks, and months so that a monthly budget is spent evenly, front-loaded, or concentrated according to demand.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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